Day 5 of the “Come” #PrinceTwitterThread extravaganza. Thanks to my hosting partner @deejayUMB and esteemed contributors @Miss_EThompson and @CaseyRain for their threads on “Come”, “Space” and “Phermone” the past couple of days. Today… “Loose!” 
“Loose!” is the fourth track Prince’s fifteenth album “Come”. There are quite a few versions of “Loose!” and they are all somewhat interconnected. For now listen to the original. open.spotify.com/track/4EzB6yfs…
The initial version of “Loose!” was recorded in February 1993, about four months before Prince had pronounced himself dead and resurrected as ‘Symbol’. It was part of the March 1993 configuration of “Come” and was segued into Partyman during the 1993 ACT I US tour.
With the June 7, 1993 announcement that ‘Symbol’ had taken Prince’s place, the feud with Warner Bros. had become a full blown war. Prince started to look into non-traditional ways of bringing his music to the public and thus bypassing Warner.
One of the experiments was the creation of a dance performance called “Glam Slam Ulysses”. Loosely based on the “Odyssey” by Homer, the performance (starring Carmen Electra amongst others) ran for two weeks at Prince’s L.A. Glam Slam club in late August/early September 1993.
On the promotional flyer that was created for the show, the show was promoted as ‘The Homer-Erotic Odyssey of Ulysses and His Gang, "Strays of the World", Through the Universe of Glam Slam’. That actually sums it up nicely.
Prince himself had no part in the show as he was on tour in Europe. He had only produced the soundtrack. Six of the twelve (then unreleased) songs in “Glam Slam Ulysses” would eventually end up on “Come”. Hence others mentioning the show in their #PrinceTwitterThread as well.
“Loose!” was one of them and it was used in the ‘Hades’ scene. Now Hades has two meanings. It is the name of the Greek god of the dead and the king of the underworld. But the name Hades has also become synonymous with that underworld.
There is video of the Hades scene available on YouTube, courtesy of dancer Kevin Stea, who was one of the dancers in the show. In the beginning of that scene we see (a rather ridiculously looking) Hades laughing and grinning.
In the actual Odyssey the scene is about protagonist Odysseus (or Ulysses in Latin – hence the name of the performance) entering the underworld and eventually returning. It is a resurrection of sorts, the very same way Prince resurrected himself as ‘Symbol’.
Hades is depicted as ‘the underworld’, but it has multiple sections and layers. From the Elysian Fields (paradise) or Tartarus (hell) and places in between. Tartarus is ‘as far beneath the underworld as the earth is beneath the sky’, so to get there you have to go down…
Now what was it that Prince sung about the afterworld in “Let’s Go Crazy?” Right! ‘And if the elevator tries to take you down…go crazy!’ And that’s exactly what happens in the first verse of “Loose!”
‘Everybody wants to know what's wrong with you,’ Prince sings. ‘They see you actin' like a crazy fool.’ So here (within the “Glam Slam Ulysses” performance) we see someone ‘go crazy’ when he’s being pulled into the underworld.
Compared to the eventually released version, the February 1993 version of “Loose!” that was used as part of the “Glam Slam Ulysses” dance performance was more or less a traditional guitar driven rock song. Check out the entire performance here:
While Prince was a real musical innovator in the 1980s, he seemed to have a bit more trouble being that once the 1990s rolled around. Grunge, alternative rock, hip hop and dance took over the mainstream, and we see Prince not fully knowing how to incorporate that in his work.
He started flirting with rap on albums such “Graffiti Bridge”, “Diamonds And Pearls” and “Symbol”, “The Morning Papers” can be seen as him donning a flannel ‘grunge’ shirt and The Undertaker project could be his take on more raw (alt)rock. “Loose!” sees him expand further.
In the early 1990s the rave and techno culture emerged from the underground. It was no longer performing bands that pushed club culture forward (like we saw in “Purple Rain” and “Graffiti Bridge”) but DJ’s.
Although his 1987-1989 dancer Cat came from the 1980s house scene and Detroit techno was heavily influenced by his work, Prince had mostly ignored that upcoming musical movement. Sampling the word ‘house’ in “Batdance” is hardly acknowledging it.
Also in the early 1990s crossover bands like The Prodigy had bridged the gap between alternative and dance and industrial bands were on the rise. Especially Nine Inch Nails was rapidly on its way to become the biggest band on the planet, as @CaseyRain pointed out yesterday.
Fun to mention is that the ‘industrial’ movement has always acknowledged the early work of Gary Numan to be of influence. The very same Numan is known to have inspired a part of Prince’s musical direction in the early 1980s as well.
Let’s take a side step for a moment, Nine Inch Nails have sampled Prince’s “Tamborine” and The Time’s “Release It” on “Head Like A Hole Opal Remix”. The latter in fact was ‘a sample of a sample’ as “Release It” samples Tower of Power’s “Squib Cakes”.
Back to “Loose!”. The eventually released version has more of a ‘industrial rock meets acid’ sound than the “Glam Slam Ulysses” version. Almost like Prince’s take on industrial/alt rave. His way of trying to keep up with the musical climate and ultimately failing.
That’s not to say that “Loose!” is an experiment gone wrong though, it is a great track. The frantic ‘ONE-TWO-THREE-FOUR-ONE-TWO-TREE-FOUR’ that opens the song has you on your feet in no time. Like an alarm going off. The stomping beat and especially the synths are addictive.
The first time this song was presented this way was April 2nd, 1994 in the tv special “The Beautiful Experience”. We see 1993 footage of Prince and the NPG lip synching to the track. I just posted snippets, for the complete version skip to the 41:50 mark. dai.ly/x517nh0
In June 1994 an instrumental snippet of “Loose!” was released as part of the end credits of the “Interactive” cd-rom. You can check it at the end of the walkthrough by @anildash on YouTube.
So when in August 1994 “Loose!” was finally released as part of the “Come” album, it had already been circulating for a year in various incarnations. The lyrics seems quite uneventful on the surface. You can clearly hear the beats are meant to be leading.
Yet, if we dive deeper there is some interesting stuff there. We already touched on the opening lines. Taken out of the “Glam Slam Ulysses” context, we can apply it to the way Prince is perceived in 1994 as well. People think he’s acting like a crazy fool for ditching is name.
That said, being the outsider, the odd one out, has always been part of the Prince mythos. Throughout his life people have been saying he was acting like a crazy fool. He touched on this in “Controversy” for instance.
And music has always been his escape. This might be him recounting his first encounter with that life line. “When the music hits U don’t know what to do.”
In the following verse Prince is trying to be street tough. ‘Bangin' gangs, slangin' wangs and rock, Won't gain you nothin' but an angry cop’. Now I must admit that as a Dutchman I had to look up what that all meant, not being a native speaker and all...
According to UrbanDictionary.com ‘slangin’ means ‘selling cocaine/narcotics’, while ‘slangin’ rock’ means selling crack cocaine (as used in the movie "New Jack City"). The site also teaches me that a ‘wang’ is a Chinese name. Is Prince stereotyping here? That can’t be right…
And while I initially had my own (ahem…) thoughts about ‘bangin’ gangs’ , I even saw that a ‘gangbanger’ is ‘a member of a street gang’. So yeah, in combination with an angry cop I can totally see ‘the street gangs selling drugs’.
But… my initial thoughts with gang bangs turn out to be correct! These lyrics have a fully sexual meaning as well. ‘Slangin’ means ‘having intercourse with many females’, a ‘wang’ is a ‘penis’, ‘slanging rock’… you get the picture! Doing that in public will also anger the cops!
I should have guessed, duality is one of the recurring themes on planet Prince… and so is educating young people. Regardless of the meaning of the first lyrics of this verse, the message is clear: ‘finish school, do something useful with your life’.
‘Get your education first then buy a pair of shoes’, is a message of empowerment. Kinda like the way “P. Control” on “The Gold Experience” has the same message (‘And step she did 2 the straight A's, then college, the master degree’) [thanks for the insight @yan_kry]
The final verse seems to be aimed at everybody who at the time was opposing Prince. ‘How the hell you gonna tell me what to do?’ He’s declaring independence here. But what follows contradicts what he had been declaring two years earlier.
In “My Name Is Prince” he sings: ‘Big cars and women and fancy clothes, will save your face but it won't save your soul’. Now in “Loose!” he sings: ‘I got the clothes, I got the bank and the crew, if you look real close, I even got your garden tool’. He even uses a similar voice!
Basically saying he owns the persons that think they own him. It is a stone cold bluff and he knows it. These things will eventually won’t save his soul. Heck, they won’t even let him win the war he had started. Assuming this is a dig at his label.
Maybe this entire verse is dual as well. Wasn’t this what he got to hear in his negotiations with Warner? They basically said that they owned every inch of him. Thus he became a slave, knowing his ‘masters’ souls could not be saved.
And that angry is what makes this song stand out on “Come”. “Loose!” is extremely aggressive. When Prince sings it is as if his spit drips out of your speakers. Those guitars are like machine guns. It has a totally different vibe than every other song on “Come”.
Musically it is more in line with guitar heavy songs like “Interactive”, and ‘Endorphinmachine” from the same era. Also vocally it is similar. Funny that all of these songs were spread out over multiple projects. “Loose” would also not be out of place on “Chaos And Disorder”.
Lyrically, like most songs on “Come”, “Loose” is (partially) about sex. But like @deejayUMB and @Miss_EThompson have already pointed out in their threads Prince often finds redemption through sex. To ‘the new spiritual revolution’ that is promised in the title track.
“Loose!” diverts from the path. Maybe because of its origins within the “Glam Slam Ulysses”, maybe as a way to show the struggle that eventually leads to the road to a (spiritual) rebirth, all the while teaching young people to finish school.
One can argue that school often leads people right into the trap that is the corporate and material world. You don’t learn to be spiritual at school. But Prince has already touched on that subject in the 1988 song “Positivity”. That message fits right into “Loose!”
The reason “Loose!” does not quite work as ‘industrial rock’ is because of that message. Most industrial music is nihilistic, self centred. This song lacks the personal downward spiral (pun intended) to fully convince the listener of the musical direction.
Which is ironic, considering the fact that highly personal and dark themes are very much present on this album in songs like “Papa” and “Solo” for instance. Tracks that will be featured in threads by @PrincesfriendYT (tomorrow) and @scottwoodssays (Tuesday).
A single release for “Loose!” was planned, which featured a new remix called “Loose! (Dub)” (as well as a “Dark” remix called “So Dark”). That single eventually got scrapped as the “Come” album lost momentum.
In 1995 a sampler cassette was released which featured a 33 second snippet of “(Lemme See Your Body) Get Loose!”. This is a remixed version of “Loose!”, of which the complete version was supposed to be included on the 12” “The Tora Tora Experience” release.
Tora Tora was Prince’s mid 1990s alter-ego. That 12” project also did not see the light of day and it is most likely that “(Lemme See Your Body) Get Loose!” is actually a renamed version of the unreleased “Loose! (Dub)”.
Eventually that remixed version of “Loose!” (along with mentioned “So Dark”) ended up on the 1998 compilation ‘Crystal Ball”, this time as “Get Loose”. This version is much more laid back and less aggressive compared to the original.
In fact, it somewhat reminds me of a James Bond theme. It fits right in with what for instance David Arnold was doing on his “Shaken And Stirred” album, or Moby with his 1997 version of the “James Bond Theme”. Only “Get Loose” was created years earlier.
But even though it pre-dates the mentioned lot, it is less original and less special than all the other similar sounding stuff that surfaced in that era. It is a fun listen, but “Get Loose” is easily forgettable.
One thing to note is that “Get Loose” and the club mix of “P. Control” are placed back to back on the “Crystal Ball” album. “Get Loose” omits the message of educational empowerment, but basically both originals share a same message.
According to the “Crystal Ball” liner notes “Get Loose” and “P. Control” ‘played back 2 back, were favorites of the Erotic City dancers in L.A.’, which brings us back to the place where the “Glam Slam Ulysses” premiered.
‘Carmen, P. Control, Shockadelica and the others packed the club and shook what their mamas gave them to these bombs!’
Well… if Prince said it, it must be true. I guess… But nowhere does it state how the audience reacted to that rather dull “Loose!” remix.
Well… if Prince said it, it must be true. I guess… But nowhere does it state how the audience reacted to that rather dull “Loose!” remix.
Prince never toured the “Come” album, but during the 1995 ‘Ultimate Live Experience” European tour songs from the album would pop up here and there. One of the staples in the setlist was “Loose”. Check it here, in London:
Another version was also played. More funky, less aggressive, the groove pushes the song forward. So let’s just assume this is “(Lemme See Your Body) Get Loose!”. And I’ll leave you with that. Here it is, performed in Brussels in 1995.
Thanks for your interest. Please check back tomorrow when @PrincesfriendYT will do a #PrinceTwitterThread on the emotional and haunting “Papa”. The following days will see @ehphd, @scottwoodssays, @arrthurr, @NightEthereal and @polishedsolid drop their threads. Enjoy!
